In fact, the last post that I wrote was meant to be this one. However, as I worked through the process of creating a custom UI, I found that the setup of Compass compilation for ExtJS 4 might have some *gotchas* that could trip people up (like me), so I decided to start from the beginning, get a solid foundation, and now move on to the actual fun stuff.

Ok? Good? On we go!

What We’re Going to Make

In this walkthrough, we’re going to try to accomplish a few things.

Objective #1: I want to show how it’s perfectly possible (maybe preferable?) to mix custom UIs with the stylesheets/images/etc. of the “default” ExtJS 4 theme. In this particular example, we’re going to create a custom Ext.ProgressBar UI.

Objective #2: We’re also going to create a custom stylesheet that produces only the minimum of what we need for the “application” we’re going to build. So instead of having a monster ext-all.css file More >

Recently, I’ve been concentrating a lot on theming for Sencha Touch. If you’ve read much of what I’ve posted, you know that I really love how the framework is put together, and think the SASS-y mode of custom theming is just awesome.

Of course, ExtJS 4 has many of the same theming features, and a very similar workflow for creating and compiling custom themes. I’ve been playing around within some theming experiments, and learned some frustrating lessons along the way. So I thought I’d share, step-by-step, how I set up my environment for successfully compiling custom stylesheets for ExtJS 4…just in case you’re having issues

Getting Started

First off, I’m assuming you already have Ruby and the Compass/SASS gem installed. If you don’t take a few minutes to get that done. For instructions on how to do this, check out this walkthrough.

Before breezing on, take a few deep breaths. This is a critical step…if you don’t do it right, you have hours of frustration ahead of you.

I start off with a blank project (I’m using Eclipse, so insert whatever terminology you use for your IDE). First, I create the root folder for my project. I’m calling this one “playground.”

During the course of developing your Sencha Touch app, you will inevitably get around to theming…after all, while the default styles are nice, they don’t exactly scream individuality. Fortunately, Sencha Touch makes theming ridiculously easy, and there are a lot of resources available to help with getting started with that.

But let’s talk about a specific example. Let’s imagine that you want to simply change the background color on your app’s toolbars. The first thing you’ll probably do is pop open Firebug or Developer Tools to inspect the CSS that’s being applied to your toolbar. Unless you’ve already customized it, you’ll probably seem something like this:

I’ve highlighted “x-toolbar-dark”, because by default, the “UI” configuration option for Ext.Toolbar is set to “dark,” which applies the “x-toolbar-dark” class to your toolbar (it will apply “x-toolbar-light” if you specify “light” for ui…more on this later).

Here’s what the toolbar actually looks like:

If you inspect the properties of this CSS class, you should see something like this:

Yeah, I know, I’m not the first person to the “create an EditableList for Sencha Touch” party. In fact, if you Google “sencha touch editable list,” you’ll find a lot of really nice code that will let you pretty easily integrate basic delete/sort functionality into your Sencha Touch app.

However, none of the offerings I ran across really fit the bill of what I was wanting, in terms of interface. Plus, it’s so much MORE FUN to build your own, right? Right!

What I Wanted

My wish list for my EditableList was pretty straightforward: I wanted it to behave *more or less* like my iPhone’s Mail app list editing. This includes:

One click to do a batch deletion/archiving of list items (btw, I absolutely HATE the same interface in the default iPhone text message app…)

The ability to swipe-delete individual messages

Some animations to make it somewhat mimic the iPhone Mail app’s animations (think “sliding” the deletion selectors in and out)

In addition to this, I wanted more or less everything–functionality, layout, interface–to be baked into my one custom extension. One of the things I didn’t like about some of the other solutions I found is that they required a certain structure external to the list More >

I’ve used NestedList quite a bit, and have been generally happy with it. One of the issues I’ve come across, though, is that it does not (as far as I’m aware, at least) support jumping around to arbitrary nodes with the NestedList.

Huh? So here’s an example 😉

Let’s say you have a bunch of products that exist within categories of variable depth. Once you reach the “product” level of your NestedList, you can out-of-the-box call getDetailCard(), build out your detail view, and be done with it. NestedList will take care of the navigation bits, and your site’s visitor will get a nice “back” button to return to the category list they used to get to the detail product.

Fine and dandy. BUT…what if you have links on your detail “card” to related products? Maybe these products exist in the same category, at the same “depth” in the nested list. But maybe instead they are in an entirely different category, More >